


All the Shadows Now Will Lose Us

by Muccamukk



Series: Post-War Dreaming [3]
Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Farmhouse of Love, M/M, Non-Graphic Smut, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Non-standard methods of expressing of affection, Post-Canon, Snowed In, cabin fever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 12:13:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22395928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: February 1947:The Pennsylvania winter continued piling up snow, and Dick kept beating a path down to the pond.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Series: Post-War Dreaming [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1139651
Comments: 16
Kudos: 67





	All the Shadows Now Will Lose Us

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Gershwin's "For You, For Me, Evermore," which came out February '47, and was rightfully panned.
> 
> Thank you to ThrillingDetectiveTales for beta reading.
> 
> [US Army Field Manual 70-15 Operations in Snow and Extreme Cold, 1944](https://archive.org/details/Fm70-15/) is a real thing you too can read.

Dick started measuring the snow around the end of January.

"Going ice fishing?" Lew asked when he noticed that Dick had broken the snow behind the barn. From the kitchen window, Lew could see a trampled path winding through the fields and down to the black smudge of hawthorn and willow that surrounded the farm's irrigation pond.

"Not exactly," was all Dick would say, and the wind-cold flush to his cheeks made it impossible to tell if he was blushing or not.

To make sure, Lew had grabbed both ends of Dick's scarf and pulled him in for a kiss. By the time he was done, the origin of the colour of Dick's face had become pretty clear, and Lew had almost burned dinner.

The Pennsylvania winter continued piling up snow, and Dick kept beating a path down to the pond. In about a week, he'd made a regular highway. Not that Lew watched him from the window, his eyes following the grey-coated figure as it made its way across the white fields, nor listened for the sound of the storm door slamming shut and the thump of Dick's boots on the mat. Even in his sleep, Lew seemed tuned to Dick's proximity—not really resting if the truck had rolled out but not come back in, like listening for the steps of the sentries walking the line.

There were times Lew wondered if Dick listened for his step with the same attention, or if he just assumed that Lew would turn up eventually, like he always seemed to.

"All right, I want to know what you're doing," Lew said the day he went down to the basement for canned tomatoes, and found Dick hammering sticks together.

"I'm, uh, I'm making a form," Dick said with a nonchalance he clearly wasn't feeling.

"That right?" Lew leaned over Dick's shoulder, making sure to press his chest against Dick's back and rest a hand on Dick's hip. Almost a year in, and he still wasn't used to the part where he got to touch whenever he wanted to. Dick didn't seem to be either, and he froze for a second before leaning back slightly. Lew could feel the rise of Dick's breath against his chest, the strong muscles of his back, and almost forgot that he was meant to be investigating the workbench.

The sticks made a frame about the size of a breadbox, but not quite a rectangle. Had anyone else made it, Lew would have ascribed sloppiness, but Dick was a man who loved right angles and precision. If his frame was woobly, he'd meant it to be. Lew couldn't imagine what it was for.

"You'll see," Dick said, refusing to give in, even when Lew's fingers found their way under his belt and traced around to the crack of his ass. Dick did push harder against Lew though, and his interest in whatever he was framing waned for the next twenty minutes.

If Lew could convince Dick that he was here for good via frequently and enthusiastically offered sexual favours, he would. Maybe someday Dick would even believe him.

Lew was out feeding the chickens later that afternoon when he saw Dick make his way down the path with the frame, a shovel, and a saw. He had his chin up with the self-conscious air of a man who knows he looks ridiculous but refuses to concede that to anyone. His entire posture was daring Lew to ask him what he was doing, just so Dick could smile and tell him again to wait and see. Dick had always enjoyed cultivating a just enough mystery to make people fish for his attention.

Snorting, Lew turned back to clearing the snow off the roof of the hen house and cursing the cold biting through his mittens. He _could_ have moved to California, he reminded himself. Instead he'd chosen physical labour in rural Pennsylvania and a gangly red-headed former paratrooper who liked to play hard to get.

Thing of it was, Lew was curious, just not enough to ask Dick what he was doing, or trudge down to the pond to investigate. The air smelled like it was going to start snowing again any minute, and Lew was going to sate his curiosity from indoors. The kitchen window had a better view anyway.

Inside again, Lew made another pot of coffee, and watched as Dick planted the shovel in the middle of the pond and started to prescribe a circle around it. Lew frowned, wondering if Dick really was ice fishing. Lew had never been, but thought that one wanted a smaller hole in the ice than one with an eight-foot diameter, and probably a pond with fish in it. He went and found the field binoculars that he'd failed to turn in on leaving the army.

When Lew got back to the window, coffee in hand, Dick was shovelling a trench bisecting his circle. With the binoculars, Lew could see that he'd taken his hat off, and this his cheeks were pink with the effort. Dick had always enjoyed work for its own sake more than Lew, but even Lew was starting to get a touch of cabin fever after months of snow. He wasn't at the point of making snow art, though, more like thinking of going into town and buying a bottle.

Lew turned the radio on to distract himself, and poured a little more sugar into his coffee. He hadn't used to take it this sweet, but it seemed like sugar took the edge off at times. A news bulletin clicked on at the top of the hour. Food shortages in Europe. War crime trials in China. A murder. Dick would care about all that, or at least pretend to, though he always found church gossip and letters from friends a better source of news. Lew didn't give a single solitary shit about any of it outside of the little bubble he'd helped build for them.

He knew that wasn't the kind of thing that lasted: living your whole life for one other person, but he'd never worked out what else he was good at. He didn't see himself as ever really fitting in with Lebanon County's hardy stock of Dutch and German farmers, and hardly had the money to travel like he'd thought he might, not after dear daddy had blown his stack and cut off Lew's allowance. Maybe Dick was right to withhold that small part of himself. Maybe Lew would grow tired of Dick same as he'd grown tired of Kathy.

Maybe, if after ten months or five years, Lew still looked at Dick and thought, "I can't imagine going a day without him," he'd feel the same three years from now, or thirty.

Lew went back to the window. Dick was sawing the snow into blocks following the shape of his form. Lew smiled to himself. Then he put on his jacket and boots and went out to check the hatchery.

Sex aside, they didn't sleep together in the same bed all that much. Lew tended to stay up all night, and Dick rose before dawn, but there were usually a few hours in the very early morning when they curled around each other. Lew would warm his hands on Dick's stomach while Dick made indignant noises and snuggled closer to him. Winter inactivity was putting some padding on Dick's ribs, and Lew loved running his hands over them while he kissed the backs of Dick's shoulders.

That night, he whispered into Dick's ear, "Why are you building an igloo on the pond?"

"Well, the ice has a nice flat surface," Dick answered, still playing coy.

Lew nipped Dick's earlobe in retaliation, but didn't ask anything else. He'd figure it out.

When Lew got up a little before noon, there was coffee on the stove, and the igloo on the pond had gotten a second tier and started to curve inward. An increasing swath of the pond was cleared down to the ice as Dick cut blocks out of the snowpack. Lew could see his grey-clad form now, bending over another bread-box of compact snow. He hefted it into place on the growing third tier, then shoved at it until it fit whatever pattern he had in mind.

Lew felt, vaguely, as though he ought to offer to help, but in reality, he had no desire to go out there and move snow around in the cold. He got more than enough of that already with just the walks and driveway. Though he did like seeing Dick flushed and laughing with exertion, Lew had several ways to achieve the desired effect within the warmth of his own home.

Cabin fever really must be getting to Dick, if he'd taken to building ice palaces out of whimsy. It also left Lew with more of the farm work. The worst part was that Lew didn't even mind. He was bored to the point where even staying in bed with a book was losing its appeal. If the roads hadn't snowed in overnight, Lew would try dragging Dick into Lebanon to see a picture.

As it was, Lew waited for Dick to come in, but not for him to take his jacket off before he manhandled him into the bedroom. Dick laughed, and didn't resist.

They managed to get Dick's pants and boots off, and Lew's shirt pushed up to his armpits, but nothing more. Wrapped together under Dick's grandma's quilt, it felt a little like they were still at war, catching a moment when they could. Even Dick clearly thinking of something else moments after they were finished felt familiar.

"I always wanted to try it," Dick mused. His head was on Lew's chest, and his hair still smelled cool and snowy.

Lew laughed. "Screwing over the footboard with your pants still on? We pretty well covered that in Haguenau, and in..."

Dick swatted at Lew's face, only catching the tip of his nose, but shutting him up just the same. "No, I mean building an igloo."

"Suppose a man should have ambitions," Lew said, but he had to admit he was curious, especially as to why Dick had decided to explain.

"It was in that field manual, you know, Operations in Snow and Extreme Cold?"

"What I love about you is that you think I remember the titles of field manuals a year and a half out of the army," Lew told him, laughing. He hadn't paid them a whole lot of attention when he'd been in the army, either. Briefing documents had always been Dick's fetish, not his. "No, wait, I remember you chewing that one out for being useless all through the Ardennes. Don't tell me you still have the damn thing."

"No," Dick said. He was rolling a clump of Lew's chest hair between his finger and thumb, and if they didn't get out of bed soon, they'd be there for the rest of the day. "I just remember reading the instructions, and thinking it would be fun, maybe get the boys’ minds off of everything, but we never had the right kind of snow."

Lew was pretty sure making the men build igloos in the middle of what everyone was now calling the Battle of the Bulge would have put their minds right on murdering their CO, but Dick had always been a better judge of what would lift morale than Lew had. Lew'd been lucky to get through a briefing without being heckled from the back. Though he supposed that was good for people's spirits in its own way. "But we have the right kind of snow here," he said, then added. "And you're bored and tired of being cooped up in the house."

Dick leaned down and licked across Lew's nipple, then flicked it with the tip of his tongue. "Being cooped up in the house has its advantages."

Lew had been right about spending the afternoon in bed. They even got all their clothes off, eventually.

Somehow, Dick still managed to get the top on the igloo that evening, though it had turned out a lot more conical than the paper mache structures of Hollywood movies—or, Lew imagined, the picture in the field manual.

"It's not finished yet," Dick said when Lew made a motion to tramp down to the pond and inspect his work.

"No?" Lew wheedled.

"No."

The next day, the weather cleared but didn't warm, turning the farm into a sheet of blinding white under a robin's egg sky. Dick dug out a pair of Lew's sunglasses so that he didn't give himself snow blindness, and spent most of the day puttering around his creation. Lew would look out one moment and see Dick smoothing the exterior with the back of his shovel, another and see Dick hauling a basket of something inside. He kept coming up to the house for odds and ends, but only smiled enigmatically at Lew's inquiring expression.

That night, Lew got reading a novel, and stayed up well past his shift on hatchery watch. He was just finishing the book when Dick got up and stomped outside to feed the hens. It must be six in the morning. Lew hadn't meant to stay up so late. He put on coffee for Dick, and considered pancakes. It seemed like a lot of work, and Lew was tired.

When Dick came back in, he poured the whole pot of coffee into a thermos and commanded, "Get your coat on. Come on!"

Lew knew better than to ask where. He knew, anyway. He put on fur-lined boots, layers of wool coats and scarves, a hat with flaps that came down over his ears, which his sister would have laughed at and Lew would have given his right arm for just two winters before, for Dick if not himself.

Even muffled up, the cold took Lew's breath away as soon as he opened the door. Dick hovered on the edge of the porch, wrapped up tight like Lew was, coat dark against the snow.

They didn't have a flashlight, but a waning moon high overhead reflected off the snow. It was easy to follow Dick's well-trodden path across the field and down to the pond. The cut through the snow looked like a dark gash ahead of them, but was only grey as Lew came up to it. The snow gleamed pure and perfect, and as they walked, a pale wash of dawn began to spread across the eastern sky, wiping the stars out one by one.

Having been awake for so long made the whole walk detached and dreamlike, almost as if Lew were floating along between snow and stars.

Lew's boots squeaked as he walked, and he tried not to think of the memories that sound brought, nor let his head swivel to look for flashes of moonlight on steel in the hawthorn thicket. They were safe here in the heart of America, or should be.

Then they were at the pond, most of the ice cleared for building materials. Lew slowed and picked his way carefully across the dark surface of the water. It reflected shards of moonlight back at him, but was mostly streaked with remnants of packed snow.

The igloo loomed in the middle, like an artefact from another time. Up close, it was even messier than it'd seemed from the house, not all the blocks set straight, and chinks caulked with snow. What should have been a smooth parabola had come out lumpen in places, and oddly angled in others. Still, shining as the moonlight caught in each crystal of snow, it had an odd beauty to it.

"Not bad for..." Lew started to say, but he realised that Dick had fallen to his knees and was crawling into the entrance tunnel. "For Christ's sake," Lew muttered, but he sighed and dropped to the icy ground.

None of the growing twilight made it through the packed snow, and Lew felt his way forward with groping hands, wishing he'd worn mittens. The entrance tunnel twisted in an S-shape before opening up into the interior itself. Lew's fingers found something soft, and then Dick took his hand. Lew crawled forward onto a bed of blankets that crackled and creaked under him, making the space smell of pine resin. Unable to see a thing, Lew let Dick guide him until he was lying on his back in a nest of blankets with Dick at his side. The darkness was so complete that Lew saw stars drift across his vision. He squeezed Dick's hand, the darkness suddenly feeling too close.

Dick made Lew let go, and slid his arm under Lew's shoulders so that Lew could half lie across his chest. He still hadn't said a word into the still and perfect darkness, and Lew shivered. Silence carried fear with it, after so many hours spent on his belly in a ditch ears straining for the crunch of hobnail boots.

"Shhh," Dick said, and kissed the bridge of Lew's nose, just under the rim of his hat. "Just wait."

Lew wanted to ask what he was supposed to wait for, but the words caught in his throat. He clutched Dick's jacket, which was starting to warm under Lew's skin, and tried not to think about how they could be in a different and much warmer bed right then. Though it wasn't cold, exactly, not with the blankets and Dick beside him, holding him close. It was more knowing that they were on top of a pond and surrounded by snow—which, depending on Dick's engineering skills, could collapse on them at any moment.

"I wanted to make something for you," Dick whispered into his ear, "for us, something special."

"That's..." Lew started to say, but Dick pushed a finger to his lips.

"Just watch, Nix," Dick told him, and Lew fell silent. He'd never been one to turn away from one of Dick's promises.

As he watched the darkness in front of him, Lew realised that he could see grey lines against an impossibly deep blue, the outlines of the blocks, perhaps. They began to lighten almost as soon as Lew noticed them, glowing with a hint of rose even as the blue of the blocks themselves brightened.

Dick pulled Lew's hat off and started stroking his hair, his gloved hand tugging through the strands until Lew leaned up and nipped at the glove, and Dick pulled his hand out of it. Now he could touch skin on skin, and caress Lew's hair as long as he wanted to. Lew heard Dick hum happily in his chest as he held Lew against him.

The expanding light of morning filled the interior of the igloo, tracing the outlines of the snow blocks and giving enough light for Lew to almost see Dick lying in the darkness beside him. The pink shimmered to gold, and the blue rose to the colour of the winter sky, but a hundred times as blue. It was the kind of soft, still beauty Dick had admired in the mountains above Zell am See, always saying he should drag Lew up for another hike through Alpine meadows. As if he were pretending that he didn't know Lew had another fish on the hook and one foot out the door. Or that Dick hadn't already been thinking about how they both should try to be normal men with normal lives after the war ended.

Dick had told Lew that he'd never seen anything as perfect or as beautiful as those mountains in Austria, but all it had seemed like to Lew was a fantasy world, where only the deaths had been real, and none of the promises they'd made had crossed the ocean with them.

The sun rose, and its light shone golden through the chinks in the ice, and Dick's arms tightened around Lew's shoulder as Lew's breath caught.

The inside of the dome had partly melted and then refrozen, creating sparkling ripples of ice crystals, but that golden beauty couldn't hide the reality of the morning. The cut of the blocks was imprecise and rough, and the walls bulged and cast shadows where they should have been even curves. The air was close. Lew's nose was cold, and there was a pine needle sticking into his ass.

When Lew turned, tipping his head awkwardly up, the dawn had revealed Dick's face. It was wide-eyed with hope and tense with waiting.

Problem was, Lew didn't know what to say. Dick had worked for days to make Lew something beautiful, and it was, heart-rendingly, imperfectly so. Dick was holding Lew against him as the sun lit up—what Lew now realised was the fourteenth day of February—and if his arms were confident, his eyes were full of that coltish uncertainty that always made Lew curse himself for not being the kind of man Dick seemed to hope to be worthy of.

Lew rolled so that he lay fully on top of Dick, then knelt astride his hips and braced his hands on either side of Dick's head. More pine needles poked through the blankets to his palms, and his body shadowed Dick's face again, but the snow reflected enough light to see Dick's mouth pull into a smile before his lips parted expectantly. When Lew didn't immediately accede, Dick looped his arms around Lew's neck and pulled him down until their mouths met.

"I love it," Lew tried to say, but the words got lost in the kiss, as he'd intended them to. He couldn't come up with a way to thank the man he loved as much as life for building him a castle he didn't want, and soliciting sex in it when they could have been in bed. The worst part was that any thank you he managed wouldn't be sincere enough.

Or maybe the worst part was that they actually _did_ have sex, after a fashion, in that damn igloo, rubbing off against each other and ending up a sticky mess like they had in the war. But, for once, Lew didn't think of that until after.

"Trying to recapture our youth?" Lew asked, as they lay together. The sun was well up, and they needed to get back up to tend to the hatchery, or Dick did. Lew needed to go to bed, or maybe just lie here and sleep until spring melt woke him.

"Something like that," Dick told him, but it was a lie, and they both knew it. Whatever this place was, it was about possibilities, not the past.


End file.
